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I know that I am mortal by nature…
“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia” Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest
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Goalless endeavors
My friend Carl and I recently had a short conversation about zen meditation. He brought up some points that all basically referred to the end goal of meditation: health and mindfulness benefits, etc. To which I replied that meditation is necessarily a goalless endeavor. Yes, meditating will make you think clearer and harmonize your body […]
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From the little…
From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State… The […]
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Foucault
It is the connection of desire to reality (and not it’s retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force. Michel Foucault, in the preface to Anti-Oedipus
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Seneca Quotes
Flipping through my copy of Carnegie by Peter Krass, which I read a few years ago, I found a torn paper of scribbled quotes from Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic: Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we […]
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Clojure Resources for Learning, Building, Developing, Experimenting
Clojure is a fascinating language and learning it has presented an intellectual challenge I haven’t experienced in a long time. I guess trying to wrap my head around all the various declensions and forms in Attic Greek was the last thing that challenged me this much. As I’m learning Clojure, I’m finding all kinds of […]
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Yossarian
From the climactic final pages of Catch-22: Yossarian crossed quickly to the other side of the immense avenue to escape the nauseating sight and found himself walking on human teeth lying on the drenched, glistening pavement near splotches of blood kept sticky by the pelting raindrops poking each one like sharp fingernails. Molars and broken […]
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Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply
Dementia Rate Is Found to Drop Sharply Key quote: The British study, published on Tuesday in The Lancet, and the Danish one, which was released last week, also in The Lancet, confirmed something that researchers on aging have long suspected but lacked good evidence to prove: dementia rates would fall and mental acuity improve as […]
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Crowdfunding, disrupting banks
Crowdfunding, disrupting banks From a report by BBVA Compass: “To succeed in this new hyperconnected and competitive environment, banks will have to follow a customer-centric approach and offer simple, user-friendly and effective products, with a high level of transparency and security,” chief economist Nathaniel Karp writes. The report and article goes on to discuss crowdfunding. […]
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Christopher Hitchens’ Lies to Atheists
Christopher Hitchens’ Lies to Atheists (via nolan) It’s not really that he lied per se, he was just very vocal about his extremist view typical of reductionistic scientists, which is the prominent perspective embraced by the likes of the Technological Singularity movement (Dean Kaman et al), etc etc. Reductionism fails to appreciate the power of […]